For modern computing devices, including traditional personal computers, as well as personal digital assistants, cellular telephones, and the like, network communicational abilities have become ubiquitous. Such ubiquity in network communicational abilities enables modern computing devices to spend an ever increasing amount of time being communicationally coupled to one or more networks of computing devices. Traditionally, resources provided by the computing devices that are communicationally coupled to such networks are identified and accessed by other computing devices with reference to resource identifiers. Resource identifiers are typically comprised of alphanumeric characters that uniquely identify one or more resources accessible via a network. Resource identifiers can often, not only identify a particular resource, but can also comprise programmatic information that can be provided to one or more processes executing on a remote computing device, that is being accessed over a network, to enable that remote computing device to obtain, filter, create or otherwise manipulate one or more resources prior to their transmission across the network.
Traditionally, network resources are accessed over a network via one or more network browser application programs executing on a client computing device that is accessing the resources. Such network browser applications can copy network resources to the computing device on which they are executing, display information presented by such network resources on display devices coupled to the computing devices on which such browsers are executing, provide interactivity with network resources, and other like functionality. For example, web browser application programs that are capable of browsing the ubiquitous World Wide Web (WWW) can display information in accordance with the structure and formatting defined by a web page, can download files and other objects, and can execute computer-executable instructions within the framework of the web browser. Other, non-browser, applications have the capability to act upon resources received from other computing devices over a network, but such other non-browser application programs are typically designed to only accept specific types of data and resources and may not comprise the flexibility of modern network browser application programs. Thus, on a modern computing device, a user may spend a substantial amount of time interacting only with network browser application programs to access resources available from other computing devices over a network.